Month: June 2017

I recently had a rather bizarre email exchange with groovera.com, a (formerly) free internet radio providing several chillout music streams. The conversation didn’t go well and this post will go into some details of that exchange because I think it is of public interest.

A little bit of background: groovera has been free for a very long time. Operating it has undoubtedly been a financial burden on the operator, who has kept the station free of advertisement. I have been supporting groovera over the years. I contacted them because the radio stream stopped working.

To which I got the following reply:

My reply:

The answer came quite fast:

I found that a rather harsh reply, so I wrote:

This is when things got a bit nastier…

I replied:

I have to point this out again: we’re talking about a free service that I have been supporting over the years. Now they removed a feature from paying users that was previously free for everyone. Groovera is free to do so but don’t expect me to continue paying.

Now this guy is angry with me for stopping my support:

Not sure where I said they were unfair. Also, I’m not sure why ‘they’ think that I was obliged to keep paying them during a fundraiser, especially as the service has just become unusable to me.

This is what came back:

How dare I donating on the LOWEST level? How mean of me!

Notice that I never wrote ‘If you don’t give me feature xyz, I will cancel!‘. I simply stated that I will cancel and did so. Did I ask for an exception? No. How am I being manipulative?

I stopped responding at this point. Clearly, I’m exchanging emails with someone who is not quite right in his mind. Responding to this is a waste of my time.

I’m posting this for the purpose of informing other people out there what kind of person runs groovera. I wish I’d known this before. I’m sorry for having supported this guy for a long time. I hate sending money to an ungrateful, bitter guy and getting rude messages as a ‘thank you’.

I’m happy that I’m groovera free now. In fact, this episode made me search for another internet radio with loungy background music. Lo and behold: There are far better alternatives out there. Groovera has become stale and boring over the years, which was one of the reasons I used them less and less.

I’ve started using soma.fm. They seem much friendlier. Hey… I may even donate money!